Help:tach/Language Names
This discussion has been closed and therefore archived here. The decisions are mentioned inside the . ---- Language names... What do we do with languages? French, Spanish, Dutch, German, etc... Are they going to be "France Hol", "DIvI' Hol", "España Hol", "Nederland Hol" and "Deutschland Hol" or, since these languages are not only spoken in those countries, should they be called something else? Or just stick to "DIvI' Hol"? :I suggest having the main article in the main language, "nederlands" for the page about dutch, and then the other languages with a redirect to that page (e.g. "Dutch" redirects to "nederlands"), just in case people look for it. As written somewhere else, it's no problem when page names are not in klingon. The article should be in Klingon though. Same happens with Germany which redirects to Deutschland. :PS: As we have a word for "English", it makes sense of course calling that page DIvI' Hol. "English" might then be redirected to that one. ::Hello. I am the main editor at the notorious wIqImu'ghom (Klingon Wiktionary) and I refer to languages by the names of the main speakers of them as it seems less nationalistic that way; that is, calling them by their English equivalents seems too DIvI'istic. I also stick to the native tlhIngan QIchpat ("phonology") when forming their names. To name a couple of languages in Klingon, there's Doych for "German" (after Deutsch), Spanya' for "Spanish", pghangS for "French" (after the French pronunciation of "France"), "Latin" is simply "latIn". Others are literal (or nearly literal) translations of ethnonyms, viz.: bIngpuHmey which is "Dutch" and chuchpuH which is "Icelandic". Again, this way it's less biased and more natural (phonetically, orthographically, and linguistically). At any rate, I just thought you might be interested, that's all. ☺—MInDu'Donbe' 17:05, 2 February 2007 (UTC) :::What is wrong with giving a language a nationalistic name? It is part of what makes a people a nation... :::Remember that anything proporting to be produced by Klingons should not shy away from nationalism. Klingons are very proud of their heritage and therefore should value nationalism in other peoples. :::Using the QIchpat obviously brings problems, since "pghangS" looks even more weird than "Français" and isn't orthographically correct either. Moreover, :::I do not believe the French would say "France" the way I say "pghangS". :::I would suggest that when we keep to not transliterating and use the names the main body of speakers give the language. So "Deutsch" for German, "Nederlands" for Dutch and "Français" for French. That there are people in Argentina speaking Spanish and people in Canada speaking French should not matter. :::This could be displayed by writing "français Canadangan jatlh" :::--qa'pIn qorghon puqloD ::::I'm not happy with this idea. This is way too arbitrary and causes many problems in future. What to do with languages that are not written in the Latin alphabet? "中文 Hol"? "Русский Hol"? What about languages, that already have the word "language" in their word, like "Адыгабзэ Hol"? Or should this transliterated into English? If so, which transliteration is to be used? Same goes for countries. Will 'Saudi-Arabia' be written in Arabic letters, from left to right? And what about countries like those in Africa or like Papua New-Guinea, which have hundreds of different national language. Even worse: Cities! The majority of China speaks Mandarin, but in Hongkong there are more people that speak Cantonese, should it be "Xianggang" (Mandarin), "Heunggong" (Cantonese) or "Hongkong" (English)? I don't think it will be appropriate to just pick the one, that is most spoken. It also becomes complicated in Klingon texts, when you run across dozens of names in their native language and you have no idea what language/country they belong to. When I started with the Klingon Wikipedia, 2 years ago, I transliterated everything — that was not a good idea. When you think of the (fictional) history of the Klingon race, you should take into account that they came into contact with earth and the federation and by that way adepted foreign words. However, in all likelyhood English was the language being used. Even though there might have been a universal translator, how would you know that the Klingons learned the word for Greenland from an Inuit, and not from a Dane or an English speaking person. Furthermore... I think you agree that most people, who use a Klingon encyclopedia, know English. The chance is much smaller that everyone knows what Deutschland, Kalaallit Nunaat, भारत or المصر means, or what language ქართული might be. Thus, I think we should use the English names, italicize them to mark them as not-Klingon, and mention any native names and their transliterations in the corresponding article. So, for instance, we create an article for "Russian Hol" and mention in the beginning of the article that it's called русский язык in Russian, which we then transliterate to russkij jazyk or even ruSkIy jeSIq (I like the last option best). IPA would also be an option. Native spellings should then be redirected to it. I think, this is the best solution... — André 07:45, 18 March 2007 (UTC) :::::Okay, you name some very good points there, which I did not think about yet. I certainly accept these, but we need to write down a few conventions. :::::# As you also say, I suggest having english and latin letters as a main language and writing convention, especially when transliterating (the article about egypt should be Egypt, and not مصر, nor "misr" or "'IjIpt"). :::::# no klingon transliterations (like "qana'Da" for Canada) :::::# Articles can still be in their native language, as long as they use latin letters (like Deutschland) and only the english page is a redirect to it (this is to avoid that we have hundreds of different languages for Germany that redirect to it.) :::::PS: I prefer Hongkong, because that's definitely international! :-) -- Lieven 14:37, 18 March 2007 (UTC) ::::::I can live with this. one thing though: Germany now is the main article, and Deutschland redirects to it. Should this not be the other way around? ::::::I get that English is the Lingua Franca these days, but this is not a copy of the English Wikipedia, right? qa'pIn qorghon puqloD 22:24, 20 March 2007 (UTC) :::::::Correct, but please read my comment above (the lengthy one). English indeed is an arbitrary choice for a lingua franca, just like every other language except for Klingon. Taking native names for countries, languages, cities and other non-klingonifyable things isn't an option, in my opinion. It's better to have all foreign words and names in 1 language, that at least most of the readers can understand, than to have a dozen words, partly in different alphabets, that are not readily recognizable. Plus, with the English Wikipedia as a reference (it could as well be the Encyclopædia Britannica or any other reference, of course) we have something like a self-made "authority" here. In the ghIlghameS book somewhere appears the word Dav, described as a terran bird (most likely a dove); if this book is canon, then we could assume that in the Star Trek universe the Klingons adopt terran words from the English language rather than from all over the planet. I guess, that's the reason why English is called DIvI' Hol. :) :::::::Thus, the article should be Germany, not Deutschland. Imagine the worst—case scenario of a historical article describing relationships between several countries... Kalaallit Nunaat, Sverige, Norge, Suomi, Руссия might be involved. They're all quite different from English and the last country's alphabet is even a different one. And I could also imagining edit wars about in which language to call something that more than 1 language can relate to. Should it be Mount Everest, ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ or सगरमाथा? And if we decide for transcribing the names, will the Tibetan one be Jo.mo.glang.ma or Chomolungma and if we take the Nepali name, should it be Sagarmāthā or Sagarmatha? I like using foreign and native words as much as possible, but I think for an encyclopedia this is quite unsuitable. Of course native names of places may (and even *should*) be mentioned in the article themselves. :::::::I must seem quite oppressive, but I think we should decide like this, because otherwise there will be much more problems in the future. — André 00:30, 21 March 2007 (UTC) ::::::::I agree with most of what you said above, but I'm merely quoting Lieven: ::::::::::Articles can still be in their native language, as long as they use latin letters (like Deutschland) and only the english page is a redirect to it (this is to avoid that we have hundreds of different languages for Germany that redirect to it.) ::::::::That's the only problem I have with it. Deutschland is in the Roman alphabet, so is Suomi or indeed Sverige. I understand the point of having an English translation (on which I can open a whole new thread: US English, Australian English or British English, and indeed, which flavour of British...). The rules as stated by the Administrator Lieven do state however that the redirect needs to point to the native name, not from it. qa'pIn qorghon puqloD 09:54, 21 March 2007 (UTC) ::::::::Furthermore, I could point out that because the Star Trek shows were/are made in the United States, where a large majority of the inhabitants speak English, having an alien species meet a non-English group of people for the First Contact is a sure-shot way of killing off a show... For all we know the Klingons actually did come across a Chinese colony first... Or indeed will. qa'pIn qorghon puqloD 09:54, 21 March 2007 (UTC) :::::::::Yes, indeed - if Star Trek were a German Invention, the UFP would be located in Berlin, an Federation Standard was German *smile*. But back to serious: We need to get to an agreement one day. (Fortunately we are no too many people discussing here) And I won't change anything to avoid edit wars until we have found an agreement. qa'pIn is right with quoting me, I think. If Deutschland redirects to Germany, we could omit it completely. It is definitely good to use english for non-latin written names (like Russia and Russian Hol)! As we see in all layout-texts that english is the main language for this wikia. Besides, I would look at wikipedia, which redirects slang terms to their official names, like "Bildzeitung" redirecting to "Bild (Zeitung)", or "USA" redirects to "United States", or even "Peking" to "Beijing". That's why I suggest "Germany" (as a not official name) redirects to "Deutschland". "Worf" should also redirect to wo'rIv. I hope this explains my point of view. Once we have set some rules, we will state them in the so called . -- Lieven 11:54, 21 March 2007 (UTC) ::::::::::"Germany" is as official or non-official as "Deutschland" in a Klingon Encyclopedia. I'm thinking of languages that don't belong to the "old world", such as Hawaiian, Yoruba or Indonesian, which adopted the English word (Kelemānia, Jámáni, Jerman) instead of the German one. On the other side, some nations did take the German word (Japanese "Doitsu" or Chinese "Déguó"), while other adopted it from Spanish (Tagalog "Alemanya"), and so on... I wonder, how many people in the world actually know what "Suomi", "Bharat", "Zhongguo" or "Kalaallit Nunaat" stand for. I think, the problem of taking British or American English is rather small, as there are only very few differences in proper nouns; and redirects will always exist. If we'd be more people here, we could maybe start a poll, stating the advantages and disadvantages of every choice. The choices might then be: ::::::::::# Transliterate into Klingon. (actually this is unacceptable, I guess) ::::::::::# Use native names in native spellings. (this causes the most problems, esp. in understanding) ::::::::::# Use transliterated native names. (will cause quite some problems, esp. in understanding) ::::::::::# Use English names. (almost no problems, but less "neutral") ::::::::::# Use another language. (but which one? Esperanto? Latin?) ::::::::::— André 12:28, 21 March 2007 (UTC) :::::::::::You begin convincing me :-) :::::::::::# ALWAYS UNACCEPTABLE: Transliterate into Klingon. :::::::::::# NO: native names indeed cause trouble :::::::::::# NO: transliterated indeed also causes trouble :::::::::::# YES: English is best (even though I feel uncomfortable with it) :::::::::::# Other languages I would say only in special cases, like the planet names. :::::::::::(I believe that pretty soon, we will be able to put a "end-of-discussion-note" here :-) :::::::::::-- Lieven 12:43, 21 March 2007 (UTC) :::::::::::: I just want clarity. André has valid points. I guess I will have to take my fight against anglification elsewhere... 8-) qa'pIn qorghon puqloD 15:57, 21 March 2007 (UTC) ::::::::::::: I feel the same way you do, qa'pIn, but his arguing is just too convincing. I believe it's beter like this now. Please read my changes inside the guide (link on top of this page), and state one last opinion, so that we can close this discussion. Thanks, -- Lieven 17:02, 21 March 2007 (UTC) :::::::::::::: Things are now clear. They whys and what-fors are known and agreed upon. Discussion closed as far as I am concerned. :::::::::::::: qa'pIn qorghon puqloD 21:34, 21 March 2007 (UTC)